• As the Company worried about declining revenues, it introduced the Permanent Settlement of Bengal in 1793. It was introduced by Lord Cornwallis.
• According to this settlement, the rajas and taluqdars were recognised as the zamindars of the land. They had to collect rent from the peasants and pay the revenues to the Company.
• The amount to be paid to the Company was fixed permanently. The Company thought that this would ensure a steady and regular flow of revenues to them and would encourage the zamindar to invest in the improvement of the land.

∙∙ The Harappan seal is possibly the most distinctive artefact of the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. Made of a stone called steatite, seals like this one often contain animal motifs and signs from a script that remains undeciphered.
∙∙ Metals were used in other artefacts, but for seals special clay was frequently used. Archaeologists have been able to reconstruct dietary practices from finds of charred grains and seeds.
∙∙ These are studied by archaeo-botanists, who are specialists in ancient plant remains. Grains found at Harappan sites include wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea and sesame. Millets are found from sites in Gujarat. Find of rice are relatively rare.

The Fifth Report was submitted to the British Parliament in 1813. It was called the Fifth Report as it was the fifth in a series of reports about the working of East India Company. The core issue of the Fifth Report was the administration and activities of the East India Company. This report had 1002 pages. About 800 pages were in the form of appendices which included petitions of zamindars and ryots, reports of Collectors, statistical tables on revenue returns and the official notes on the revenue and judicial administration of Bengal and Madras.

Objectives of the Report : Many groups of people in Britain were not happy with the working of East India Company in India. They opposed the monopoly enjoyed by East India Company over trade with India and China. Many British traders wanted a share in Company’s trade in India. They emphasised that the Indian market should be opened for British manufactures. Many political groups even argued that the conquest of Bengal benefitted only the East India Company and not the British nation as a whole. They highlighted the misrule and maladministration by East India Company. As a result, the British Parliament passed several acts in the late 18th century to regulate and control the rule of East India Company in India.

These are the problems in using official sources in writing about the history of peasants:
(i) There are official sources that reflect only British official concerns and interpretation of all events from the outlook and angle of the English. For example, the Deccan Riots Commission was specifically asked to judge whether the level of government revenue demand of the cause of the revolt.
(ii) Most of the events, revolts and happenings have been presented in a bias manner. The colonial government and official had their own political, economic, religious, cultural and social interests. They had always tried to present a sub-standard picture of Indian society, people, tradition, culture and even the achievements.
(iii) The sources have been presented and recorded by such clever and naughty people who have intentionally presented things with false evidences also. For example, the Deccan Riot Commission alter presenting all the findings with such evidences which was utilise to give authenticity to the report of the commission. The commission has presented this fabricated fact that the government demand was not the cause of the peasants’ anger. It was the moneylenders (again Indians) who were to blames. Such argument is found very frequently in British colonial records. This shows that there was a persistent on the part of the colonial government to admit that popular discontent was ever on account of government action.
(v) Official reports, thus are invaluable sources for the reconstruction of history. But they have to be always read the case and just opposed with evidence called from newspapers, unofficial accounts, legal records and, where possible, oral sources.

Religious beliefs of the people of Indus Valley Civilisation:

• Seals form an important source of information about the religious life of the Harappans. Apart from the discovery of fire altar from Kalibangan, no cult objects, temples or places of worship have been found.
•  From the seals which have been discovered , it has been concluded that religion during the Harappan times bore traces of later Hinduism as images of pashupati, goddess and sacred trees and animals have been discovered.
• In one of the figures, a plant is shown as growing out of a woman’s body. Historians believe it to be Mother Earth, who was also worshipped in Middle East and Europe.
• No place of worship such as temples were found in any of the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation. 

The discovery of the Ancient Indus River Valley Civilization was made, when the Harappan city, the first city of Indus Valley, was excavated. In 1857, the British engineers accidentally used bricks from the Harappa ruins for building the East Indian Railway line between Karachi and Lahore. In the year 1912, J. The Indus Valley Civilization was an ancient civilization located in what is Pakistan and northwest India today, on the fertile flood plain of the Indus River and its vicinity. ... By 2600 BCE, dozens of towns and cities had been established, and between 2500 and 2000 BCE the Indus Valley Civilization was at its peak.

There are several different kinds of archaeology: prehistoric, historic, classical, and underwater, to name a few. These often overlap. For example, when archaeologists studied the wreck of the Civil War ironclad, the Monitor, they were doing both historic and underwater archaeology.